Jelly Roll: The Song He Couldn’t Listen To
Jelly Roll won an ACM award with Lainey Wison for their duet “Save Me” last week (5/16).
Before the show, Jelly chatted about how hard it was for him to write and then share the song with people. He said, “‘Save Me.’ Man, was that one. I had trouble playing it in a room for people for like 3-4 weeks after I recorded it.”
He added, “Like, I couldn’t listen to it with them, you know what I mean? And so, singing it was really rough.”
His Acceptance Speech
Jelly went to say that the song literally saved him. In his acceptance speech at the show, he said from the podium, “I’m gonna try not to get emotional, but seriously, this song saved me. I was in a dark place. I wrote it from my soul. I knew people would connect with it.”
He continued, tears in his eyes, “This song is a triple-platinum record. I wrote it with a high school friend—we never thought we’d be songwriters. I never thought I’d be standing here. I thought I would die or go to jail, and I’m standing here an ACM Award winner.”
Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson accepting their 2024 ACM Award for Musical Event. (Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
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Jelly told us after he and Lainey Wilson recorded their duet of his “Save Me” together, “Twenty, thirty times, Lainey’s went out of her way to come and do this for me. I could not have asked for a better dance partner.”
It started a beautiful friendship. He said, “It seeped over to the family: my daughter loves her, and my wife loves her. I love Duck (her boyfriend, Devlin Hodges), and Duck loves me. I love her parents.”
He concluded, “I think that we have a moment that will remembered that way forever. I think they’ll be an era where we’ll always look back in country music and go, ‘That was kind of Jelly and Lainey’s year.'”
Lainey’s Thoughts
Lainey agreed, saying, “I knew before I officially met him that he was just my kind of people. What you see is what you get, and I love people like that.”
She added of recording “Save Me” with her friend, “I made a promise to myself that any song that I cut that I didn’t write, I needed to feel like I wrote it at least. I needed to feel like I had been through it or experienced it in some kind of way, or it was a story that just needed to be told, even if it wasn’t mine specifically. This one turned out that it was something that I could relate to one hundred and ninety percent.”
